Change My Mind

Lukas Leuzinger and Alex Buxeda interview Cass Sunstein for Schweizer Monat. They dissect the mechanics of liberalism. Sunstein defines a tradition that encompasses Hayek and Burke. He counters the claims of Patrick Deneen. He argues that choice does not destroy faith or family. The dialogue shifts to nudges. Sunstein explains how choice architecture assists humans without it being manipulation. They analyze speech standards. They contrast the First Amendment with the laws of Switzerland and Germany. Sunstein outlines the divisions of power. He warns against the expansion of the executive.Buy Sunstein's latest book: On Liberalism: In Defense of FreedomCheck Sunstein's books here

In this episode, we explore how consilience collapses concepts, the nature of entropy, markets as anticipation machines, biology as a model of past environments that survives by matching the present and future, the division of labor freeing mental bandwidth, energy as the basis of value, and the provisional nature of all knowledge.

Abel Abelson, a neurodivergent writer and YouTuber, has navigated the unique challenges of being distinct from the majority, on which our conversation focuses mainly. He was recognized by Mensa with an IQ of 133, which places him in the 98th percentile in terms of cognitive ability. Today we talked about whether every problem can be solved through further understanding, how one can be content with the fact that one will be discontent, the apparent incompatibility of acceptance and performance, how to define happiness, the need for enough similarities between two people to have a successful relationship, the pursuit of transcendent threads of logic, how the reason you like football has nothing to do with football and all to do with the fact that you are an ape, the huge variance among people in curiosity and intelligence and the best way to approach it, disgustingness of the anti-egalitarian nature of the massive differences in intelligence across the population, the leverage of your actions as a measure of your intelligence, the nature of trauma, the power of mindfulness, the self-fulfilling effect of believing that you have a problem, progressive voluntary exposure as a solution to fear and trauma, the incoherence of free will as uncaused behavior, the need for immediate regulation of our emotions after a dramatically negative event to avoid trauma, the need to update our knowledge faster than every 1000 years, the perpetual ability to establish dialogue if you criticize the antibodies of the incendiary ideas, and the incoherence of the Naturalistic fallacy. You can find Abel on YouTube Buy Abel’s books on Amazon

Today I had a conversation with Lukas S, he is a personal coach that focuses on human performance and mindset training. Check him out on Instagram at ⁠⁠otokstrength⁠⁠ or online at ⁠⁠otokstrength.com⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠theprotocol.life⁠⁠ We talked about how complaining is useless but it feels good to us, how finding common ground with people who believe opposite ideas is what allows your or others' minds to be changed, the importance of self-awareness to not be fooled into the fake things that the status quo advocates for, distinguishing what furthers our long-term objectives and what does not, how getting rid of what does not contribute to the long-term objectives maximizes our potential, how we have agency but admitting so requires taking responsibility over our mediocre lives, how doing less is the key to perform more (via negativa), how enduring through long periods of time without positive feedback is what suck feels like and it is the thing that differentiates success from mediocrity, the importance of keeping promises to ourselves, and how all levels of well-being (like relationships, finance, and health) should be taken care of in order to have a good life and how it is hard to dismiss one without doing so with the others.

Victor Dover is an innovator in city planning, neighborhood design and street design, he serves as president of the Parks Foundation of Miami-Dade and as a board member of the National Recreation & Parks Association. We talk about how the cost of car dependency is hidden from the individual by governmental subsidies, how the promised ‘’car freedom’’ in the 50s became car dependence which newer generations are rejecting, how maximum flow of cars occurs at medium speeds, the evil of minimum parking lots because it causes car dependence, that 0 is an absurd price for parking, that people will use the infrastructure that is built, the bankrupting nature of highways and the huge contrast of the big return on investment of bike lanes(both in financial and healthcare terms), how unbundling the price of apartments from that of parking spaces would make people realize how expensive cars are, the overprescription of both parking and opioids in the US, how reducing population density increases traffic due to increased kilometers driven, how new businesses like Uber and Cabify are diminishing the amount of parking demanded & how dynamic parking pricing according to demand is optimal. Buy his book Street Design: The Secret to Great Cities and Towns Check his web page at doverkohl.com Check his YouTube channel at @DoverKohl

I am joined today by my friend Emilio to discuss the inevitable end of our journey, the value of noticing your own mortality, the dichotomy between life and death, the process of appreciating things and people while they are around us, the need for acting in a virtuous manner while we can, how the Stoics dealt with death and whether developing an objective morality is possible.

My good friend Luca joins me to discuss the difference between what FEELS good and what IS good, a doughnut feels good but is not good(in the long term), our feelings fool us. We talk about the trueness and fakeness of different feelings which is in the bullseye of effective altruism’s principal flaw: that what feels the best when doing good is not what has the biggest impact, zero sum vs positive sum games, Intelligence singularity, utilitarian ethics reduced to the absurd with the repugnant conclusion, that we have trade offs all the way down, the high cost of nationalism, that for me to be rational requires taking into account your irrationality, the scientific method, that applying selection at a lower level allows higher levels to not be killed, Goodhart's law, and that Ideas being selected for in our minds in a natural selection way makes us unable to get away of the naturalistic fallacy in some way.

Roman Mironov is a coach, he helps men get their act together by getting them out of their porn addiction, he himself wasted many years addicted to porn. You don’t have to make his same mistake. Roman and I talked about: 1: How porn is to sex as McDonald’s is to food. 2: That any male can now see more naked females in 1 day than kings did in their whole lives. The reward mechanism of males is hijacked by what seems to be ‘’evolutionary success’’(seeing many naked females) that in reality is a shallow pleasure that depletes them of their natural drive to improve themselves and their community. 3: The abyss between the female and male sexual psychologies. Not understanding the profound differences in the sexual psychologies between males and females leads to conflict and friction. The solution, as we propose, is to understand the biological basis and the evolutionary process leading to this difference, which emerges from the differing optimal strategy in terms of gene reproduction between males and females, a phenomenon that is seen among all classes of animals and even among plants! While what arouses females is predominantly a mixture of status, commitment and romance, what arouses males is sexual variety and cues of fertility, this is why Japanese anime titillate the male brain while paranormal romance is its match for the female brain. Check Roman’s web page Roman’s YouTube channel Roman’s Instagram

I explain in this bonus episode my views on how incompatible simultaneously stating that a public library and copyright laws are a good thing is. It is socially accepted for public libraries to exist so that in principle everyone has access to any book without paying for it in the moment, but this is not coherent with another belief that society simultaneously holds as unacceptable: downloading the ebook for free infringing the copyright law. I am not trying to argue against copyright law, I am just pointing my finger at a cognitive dissonance I believe to have found in the general public. The border between owning a book and not doing so is blurred when you take into account that 99% of the time we spend paying attention to a book is when we read it. If the objective was to 1maximize the revenue of authors and at the same time promote their books by giving them a showcase in which their work can get known so that we incentivize the production of books while 2making their books accessible for the general population, we would be incredibly lucky if the best tradeoff of these objectives were maximized by what we happened to stumble upon with our social conventions. There is clearly a diminishment in the amount of sales when someone reads a book from a public library, specially among the people with a lesser taste toward owning a book on a permanent manner, why should we subsidize people who happen to have this taste and not focus instead in the less well off people in our society? I would love to hear your opinions on the so please do comment them on the youtube video of this episode if you wish so.

Victoria is an Internal Medicine Physician, she claims that medicine is how we eat, think, feel, our relationships and more, that there’s no one pill solution. During her first 6 months of residency she quickly realized that traditional medicine was not addressing the root of the problem. She became intrigued in addressing the root of the problem to prevent patients from frequently returning to the hospital and to ultimately help people improve their quality of life. We converse on the evolutionary maladaptation of our biology to our current environment in relation to the abundance of calories, sugar, fat and salt. The conflict of interests emerging from an asymmetry of information and a corrupt healthcare system between healthcare providers and receivers. How focusing on ''the basics'' such as improving your diet, the way you think and your relationships can make a major impact in your health that no pill could. How the problems we moderns face are a lot of times intercepted by profit seeking corporations that can do so because of a badly designed system of interests, which leads U.S. citizens to spend more than double on healthcare than the average european. Check Victoria's Web Page healthfulrootsmd.com You can also find Victoria on Instagram & Linkdin

Mark Henick is a mental health activist and advocate, author, host and public speaker who has appeared on tv, radio and online podcasts on multiple occasions, he is especially well known for his popular TedX  talk on YouTube which now has had more than 6 million views. We talk about: Suicide, why some people choose it and how to avoid it, the meaning of life, public policy measures relating to suicide prevention, how we have a common flaw of identifying ourselves with our feelings, the important differences between the collective and the individual and the remarkable similarities between the failed war on drugs and the suicide numbers that represents a social failure. Find more about Mark on: His Web Page, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube his podcast Living Well With Mark Henick Buy his best-selling book So-Called Normal: A Memoir of Family, Depression and Resilience

Peter Christian was an engineer, consultant and teacher of management, worked in Crayola Corporation and he is also the author of two business books Influences and Influencers: How Our Relationships Affect and Shape Us and What About the Vermin Problem: A Guide to Avoiding Damaging Business Practices. We chat over why businesses succeed or fail, possible conflict of interests between customers and providers, the need for marketing on a business, the difference between capturing and producing value and more. Contact Peter at phchristian53@gmail.com Buy his books at https://petechristianbooks.com/ You can check his updates at https://phchristian53.medium.com/